A Facebook Christmas Love Story

In Limbo, where I’ve so often spent the holidays, I sat down last year in front of my computer on the night before the night before Christmas and tried to soothe my balsam-scented loneliness by reaching out to my newfound social network (“social networks” being what we have now in place of “friends and families”). Outside, in the streets of my snowy Montana hometown, noisy drinkers were strolling from bar to bar as I typed out the sad word “Facebook” on my keyboard and scanned my screen for familiar names and pictures. I didn’t find many for the simple reason that I was a novice at silicon socializing, and 90 percent of the people I knew on Facebook were people I didn’t know at all.

The truth was that my social network wasn’t mine. The month before, in a rush to join modernity in time for the publication of a new book, I raided the pages of three well-connected colleagues, looking for literary types who might be inclined to accept the overtures of a publicity-hungry writer. The result was a group of more than 300 contacts who were, to me, something between total strangers and high-tech ghosts — although I did have extensive information about their tastes in books, music and movies.

But company is company at the holidays, and a divorced man in his mid-40s — whose daughter and son are at their mother’s house and whose parents and brother are states away — can’t be picky. I poured a mug of black coffee and started hunting.

But before I reveal what happened next, I’d like to touch on a study that came out recently concerning the contagiousness of loneliness. An article in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology presented the argument that feelings of sadness and isolation can spread from the folks who are feeling them not only to their friends but also to their friends’ friends. And while these findings seem odd at first (aren’t the lonesome lonely because they lack friends?), the University of Chicago psychologist who is behind them says that they make sense.

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Human Empire

“Let’s say for whatever reason — the loss of a spouse, a divorce — you get lonely,” the study’s principal author, John T. Cacioppo, told The Washington Post. “You then interact with people in a more negative fashion. That puts them in a negative mood and makes them more likely to interact with other people in a negative fashion, and they minimize their social ties and become lonely.”

Understood in these terms, my search for ghostly “friends” last year might well have been an unconscious strategy to broadcast my misery so far and wide that half the country would catch the holiday blues. But as far as I knew, alone in my home office with a space heater blowing on my legs, I just wanted someone nice to talk to — ideally, one of the pretty single women who appeared during my initial surveys of my literary acquaintances’ Facebook lists. My goal was not to transmit my gloom but to dispel it. (Or maybe it was a little bit of both; I can get awfully grumpy in late December.)

Anyway, there I was, alone in my home in Montana, hunched up at the computer. Cut to the San Francisco airport. Sitting cross-legged on what she later told me was the “incredibly filthy floor” of a departure lounge was a smartphone-wielding traveler who was prevented by foul weather from flying to see her family in Chicago or returning to base in Los Angeles, where she broke up the previous month with her longtime boyfriend. She wasn’t in a good mood, this stranded traveler. Her emotions were negative.

As were mine, thank heaven.

The sound of the Facebook message alert on her smartphone — a quick, soft buzzing — was the sound of long-distance contamination. No more than 30 seconds before, I noticed her thumbnail photo on my computer, logged on to her page, digested her basic data (freelance writer, California resident, not married, brown hair, smooth skin, immense blue eyes) and decided to drop her an unsolicited line. I think it began with “What’s shaking?” or thereabouts, and I did not assume it would be answered.

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Data source: 2008 American Community Survey, U.S. Census

What might have happened if it hadn’t been, I’m still not sure, and I’d rather that she not think about it now that we’re living together in the same house. I might have gone on to the next picture. Or not. I’d like to think not, but I honestly can’t say. (Meaning that, honestly, I sort of can.)

But holiday miracles shouldn’t be overly scrutinized. And this is one I’d rather not ruin, thank you, despite its murky psychological origins and its cold, electronics-heavy setting. Suffice it to say that everything worked out in precisely the opposite manner described in the loneliness study. A stream of potentially harmful bummer particles was exhaled into the ether from southern Montana and, faster than Santa can pop down a chimney, carried to Northern California, where they mixed with another cloud of bluesy pathogens and somehow, in defiance of social science, provoked a positive reaction.

The original reply is now lost. I believe that frees me to make it up: “I’ve read and loved every word you’ve ever written. Why don’t I already know you? Well, now I do!”

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The holidays have returned. It’s been a year for us. It’s been a year for all of us, in fact — all of us in this great network of social networks that used to be called “America” or “life.” And it has not been an easy year for some of us — indeed, for a lot of us, it’s been a tough one. Job losses. Debts. Extended tours of duty. Loose-lipped adulterous Vegas cocktail waitresses. Cheer up, though. Be happy. Why?

Because I’m happy.

And you and I aren’t as separate as we thought.

Walter Kirn, a frequent contributor, is the author of “Lost in the Meritocracy” and the novel “Up in the Air,” which is now a movie.

A version of this article appears in print on December 20, 2009, on Page MM11 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Digital Mistletoe. Today's Paper|Subscribe